brainwagon

This link is making the rounds of a couple of different mailing lists I’m on. Activision games to bypass consoles – News at GameSpot When he wasn’t promoting the company’s games or technology, Kotick was celebrating its laserlike focus on the bottom line. He pointed to changes he implemented in the past as being particularly […]

Pardon me for this diversion from usual topics. While commuting in with my wife this morning, I was listening to a talk show discussing a reality TV show (specifically, the truly horrendous Real Housewives of New York, a show which obviously stretches the meaning of the words “real” and “housewives”). In it, one of the […]

It was announced today that Microsoft was facing a software crisis: their short sighted engineers only allocated space for a two digit total for the number of months late that Windows Vista will slip, and it is now feared that when they finally do ship Vista 119 months late, it will cause… Okay, okay, it’s […]

A couple of days ago I pointed out the hypocrisy of Isaac Hayes in accepting payment for episodes of Southpark that ridiculed religion but adopting a different standard when it applied to him. Christian Pundits agreed with me. The problem is, I don’t agree with much that Christian Pundits have to say about anything. For […]

Metamerist was musing abut Pigeonholing Algorithms & Self-fulfilling Prophecies this morning, a subject that I’m kind of interested in as well.   We’ve all used these systems which try to evaluate our choices in music or books, and then make suggestions based upon what we say.   They are sometimes useful, but most often useless in trying […]

I laughed out loud. Scoble didn’t think it was funny, and just said “Ouch”. Of course all that is truly funny is true.  This is what you reap when your product development is all about filling out long checklists of features and signing partnership deals with third parties. [tags]Microsoft,Parody,You Tube[/tags]

The perversion of intelligent design can be seen in Cornelius’s Hunter’s title and opening paragraph on ID The Future: The main problem with our red state-blue state culture today is that good pizza is only available in the blue zones. As Harold Hubis, moderator of last night’s evolution vs. ID debate had warned me, last […]

Michael Desmond, writing for PCWorld, wrote this article called Ten Reasons to Buy Windows Vista. Me? I’m completely unconvinced. Let’s walk through what he thinks are the strengths of Windows Vista: Security. The funny thing is, I expected all the previous versions of Windows to provide security, and for the most part, I’ve been cruelly […]

It’s been some time since I mocked Robert Scoble, mostly because I’ve mostly stopped reading him. I guess i just don’t find seesawing between promotion of the A-List bloggers and apologetics for the sins of Microsoft all that compelling. But today I must have had more free time than usual, so I found myself reading […]

Yesterday afternoon, I got a phone call from my son who informed me that the virus scanner on his Windows box was disabled, and that it would no longer run. When I got home to check it out, I found that my laptop, which used the identical virus scanner (Computer Associates EZ Antivirus) had been […]

What’s wrong with Microsoft’s DRM strategy: “We don’t want this technology to be available to every hobbyist. We need to keep the number of licensees down to a manageable number. We charge a license fee to keep the number of people we have to deal with down to a level we can handle.” Really, why […]

I know, I know, I’m on an Intelligent Design kick.  I’ll move on sometime soon, but I couldn’t help noticing that luminary of the Intelligent Design community, William Dembski apparently could find no point to criticize in E. O. Wilson’s editorial for USA today.  His only addition is the title of his own article, which […]

As part of my usual scuffling around, reading about intelligent design, I ran across this article: Typical Objections to Intelligent Design by Bob Murphy which appears to be a sincere attempt by someone who doesn’t follow the issue of intelligent design very closely to make some sense out of the recent hullabaloo regarding it. He […]

As some of you might know, I’m fascinated by psuedoscience. When I was a young child, I had a deep interest in all sorts of strange stuff. I remember reading Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods and musing about ancient astronauts. I read books about UFOs. I read books about pyramid power. ESP. But, by […]

It was time for my daily dose of Robert Scoble, and once again he providing some thought provoking fodder for me to go on about. Last week I mentioned just how boring I thought Gates’ keynote was at CES: full of empty hyperbole, long on announcing partnerships, short on announcing actual products that one could […]